The present invention is in the technical field of education and technology. More particularly, the present invention is in the technical field of software design and process design.
Teaching classroom and online courses is often based on the process of explanation and lecturing. The availability of YouTube and other Internet content creates competition to classroom explanation and, in some courses, makes classroom explanation no longer necessary. When students are motivated to learn in the classroom, they have plenty of openly available resources to transfer the knowledge itself and to construct it.
Theories of constructivism support the idea that in order to assimilate new content the learner needs to be motivated. So, a part of student success in learning is dependent on the emotional state of the student. Further, Benjamin Bloom in 1984 published a paper on Two Sigma Problem, which indicated that when proper teaching techniques are implemented students perform two standard deviations better than without those techniques. This provided evidence that teaching techniques do make a difference in the learning process. Bloom identified one-on-one instruction as the most successful teaching technique, echoing the approach of ancient tutors in Greece. Therefore, both the motivation of the student and the teaching techniques are important. The gamification system presented here allows for motivating the students and reaching out to a variety of personalized teaching techniques.
Technology today can be a bicycle of the mind for teachers to bring higher levels of effectiveness in teaching. There is room for improvement as laid out by Bloom. It is not simply that students are slow to learn. When teaching is aligned with student engagement and motivation teachers can be more effective. Gamification provides principles in this approach.
However, Gartner research noted that 80% of gamification efforts started in 2012 were to fail. This indicates that applying gamification is difficult. Just using leaderboards and using points often fails to accomplish the motivational goal. The point of my invention is to make gameful activities optional, just as learning is optional in any class already. The Educational Gamification System creates a wrapper of gameful activities for the classroom or online courses with no modification to standard curriculum given selected by administration for the class.
The gamification layer in turn allows for multiple paths of difficulty in the course to help students find flow between boredom and anxiety. The Educational Gamification System creates a background failure environment for students to try challenges, experiment, fail, and learn. Failure facilitates learning more efficiently than success. The exams and other graded activities typically focus on success and reward success. The goal of the gameful activities is to focus on re-do, on failure, and count units of progress.
While grades continue to be present and describe the level of achievement in required elements of the class, the gamification points allow for measuring effort, practice, and creation of safe-failure learning environment.